THOSE TWO DAMNED POETS
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage THOSE TWO DAMNED POETS BY ALBERT BERMEL The first-act curtain scene of Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse (Chelsea Theater, Brooklyn Academy) shows us Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud...
...For himself, Rimbaud aspires to equaling or exceeding "Racine and the Greeks...
...Rimbaud appears as a daydream and the two men replay the episode, except that, instead of cutting Verlaine's palms, Rimbaud kisses them...
...He must mold it, and from this purposeful creation art will emerge naturally...
...Like the Vice character in 16th-century morality plays, Rico makes the pompous lesson in good and evil slightly easier to take...
...Total Eclipse strikes one as being much more dated than, say, Baal, for which Brecht, in 1918, found an unorthodox dramatic form that superbly accommodated its Rimbaud-like hero...
...what the Wine-Sellers Buy (Vivian Beaumont), by Ron Milner, came out of the New Federal Theater series, but it proves a heavy letdown after the author's Who's Got His Own, an earlier, eloquent play...
...David William made several directorial choices that were bound to sink Congreve's wit...
...the actors play mostly on bare boards, adjusting us to Verlaine's final erasure of unpleasant memories and his desire to remake a disappointing life by turning back to rosier times that never were...
...only the blurred nimbus of Rimbaud, that prodigy who considered himself a child of the sun-god...
...On Stage THOSE TWO DAMNED POETS BY ALBERT BERMEL The first-act curtain scene of Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse (Chelsea Theater, Brooklyn Academy) shows us Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in a bistro in 1872 at the height of their tortured affair...
...The hero, Steve Carlton, a black youngster in Detroit, gets nagged at by his widowed mother and her gentleman caller who want him to grow up an honest citizen and a man...
...Thanks to impeccable directing by Richard Vos, the "feast" keeps coming, course on course, from an orchestrated assemblage of more than 20 actors and a band led by Hy Anzell, the first, the greatest, the only Jewish tornado...
...He went for psychological realism, a desperate error in the case of the hero, Mirabel...
...Finally, by using autumnal lighting and dreamy movement he thought he was imposing what he had already accomplished—a sad ending...
...Like it or not, he is engaged in the twofold creation of his art and himself...
...Wooed away from his wife and respectability, Verlaine has no clear idea of what he wants from life (his most frequent remark is "I don't know...
...Rimbaud asks his lover to place his hands upward on the table...
...the unlit settings keep past events faintly alive...
...In both plays he has explored a character's soul with rare economy of means...
...Rimbaud, aged 16, dumps himself on Verlaine and the family, wearing the shabby minimum of clothes and a Van Gogh-ish straw hat...
...Brisburial, a highly ambitious work, lampoons our habit of drowning and burying sorrows in drink and food: Keep stuffing and to hell with the corpse...
...This is the play's supreme moment...
...Yet he dazzles Verlaine, who pictures him as "the most beautiful of all the saints...
...He also sees a life that may, in retrospect, seem shapeless or unacceptable to him...
...He pours out similar regrets upon shooting Rimbaud, hitting him, as if by poetic justice, in the hand...
...Michael Schultz has staged Wine-Sellers with a lot of determined flowing and loping motion, and some infusions of dance, all across Santo Loquasto's set, a detailed cutaway of several streets, a store and two homes...
...yet he has a wonderfully expressive voice which lets him omit physical emphases...
...The actors, particularly Glynn Turman as Steve, quarrel and nag and preach and nag with admirable fervor...
...Still...
...Verlaine, however, is temperamentally unable to lead the bold, unapologetic life Rimbaud tempts him with...
...But Hampton's dramatic techniques do not seem consistently worthy of it...
...The younger poet then whips out a pocket knife and jabs it into the supine palms, exclaiming that love must learn to bear the unbearable...
...His Verlaine, caught between rebellion and conformity, bentwood chairs and unmade brass beds, bo-hemian outfits (by the ingenious Nancy Potts) and nakedness (by God), is unified through the play's 12 scenes without the aid of phony mannerisms...
...Right after he strikes his wife he is on his knees to her, pleading, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry...
...It leans unnecessarily on quasi-documentary and explanatory effects, such as the announcement of each scene's place and time...
...Hampton's achievement is to remind us that the artist keeps reviewing his past and seeing more than an array of completed and incomplete works...
...We were always happy," Verlaine muses, "always—I remember...
...Knots and The Wood Demon (thanks to the gas shortage) and am loath to criticize adversely on the evidence of one play...
...But Rimbaud has a mission for him—to create an extraordinary existence out of which will grow poetry that is hot, personal and undomesticated...
...The material of this celebrated relationship is never less than fascinating...
...by the girl, who wants to save all her love for him...
...His $70 platform shoes, billiard-green or shocking pink suits and gigantically brimmed hats are worn with terrific, unabashed flair by Dick A. Williams, a rhetorician who speaks with his whole body...
...Verlaine wonderingly complies...
...and so does the text when it turns didactic, explaining that "the power is in you, not in your children, not in your money, machines or gods...
...The play is a catered wake...
...Out of this clutter of plot puppets only one figure comes to life, that of Rico, playing Mephistopheles to Steve's 17-year-old, henpecked Faust...
...In places the characters overassert themselves as being the first, the greatest, the only...
...tables overflow with fruit and delicatessen, some of which the actors carry into the aisles crying, "Eat, eat, that's what you're here for...
...The Actors Company, on the other hand, a British troupe that stopped off at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a few weeks and is now on tour, had one of the most generous English comedies in its repertory, Congreve's The Way of the World—and muffed it...
...But behind the fooling and the instructions is an expansive modern ritual of death and renewal, where the celebrants devour knishes and cantaloupe as a substitute for consuming the body of a "god" (the dead TV star...
...Then, having lost laughs on the lines, he tried to recoup them through acting shticks and tics...
...They make a difference, but not enough...
...In the last act much of the scenery has gone...
...His Konstantin stood still, arms at his sides, talking passionately...
...A wild, Jewish farce-cum-thriller, it presents a cast of mourners that includes Uncle Money, who has upgraded his wholesale supplies from automobile parts to transplantable human parts, and Studs Moses, a salesman who wants to guide his tribe "all the way to God...
...Robert Kalfin and Doug Higgins, the director and designer, have devised four busily furnished "simultaneous stages" on different levels, so that after each scene is done the spectator cannot help recalling it for the rest of the act...
...The play's structure is old-fashioned, if not commercial...
...As Verlaine, Christopher Lloyd sports a bald dome, a tassel of flying hair and a beard that looks to be about 70 per cent spirit gum...
...Michael Finn, who delivers an athletic Rimbaud, has a presence not unlike Albert Finney's, although he lapses during his longer speeches into glassy-eyed recital, and undercuts the outward masculinity of his interpretation with strange giggles...
...Hampton has escaped from historical truth and ventured into the truth of theater, summing up Verlaine's character in one ironic stroke while allow ing Rimbaud to lose definition and dissolve into mystery...
...When they first meet, the 28-year-old Verlaine is a married, upper-bourgeois civil-service worker, living with his in-laws and drinking to ward off his dissatisfactions...
...Like its groaning tables the action is loaded with rich fares, contemporary and traditional references, and verbal felicities...
...Playing the especially testing part of Kon-stantin, Lloyd did his best to lift the production out of sterile dedication by setting the prissy, youthful playwright afire from within...
...I missed the Company's King Lear...
...there is even a bathroom, incorporating a really vitreous-looking toilet bowl and a sink with faucets that splash...
...In the play's final scene, 20 years later, shortly after Rimbaud has died, Verlaine sits at what looks like the same table, refashioning the incident in his memory...
...Only a couple of weeks ago I saw Lloyd in the Roundabout Theater's generally flavorless and humorless revival of The Seagull, one of those acts of frantically sincere homage to Chekhov that do everything but evoke him...
...This Verlaine is a poem of acting...
...The New Federal Theater, under the enterprising guidance of Woodie King, has been putting on unusual new shows every few weeks at its playhouse on East 3rd Street in lower Mnahattan...
...The latest, Bris-burial (A Feast) by Edward Pome-rantz, consists of a double ceremony: the interment of a famous TV personality and the circumcision of his infant brother, born prematurely when the pregnant mother's grief got out of hand and she leapt Hamlet-like into the grave...
...As in a "total eclipse," we perceive behind Verlaine—through his recollection...
...Lloyd keenly understands both the poet's urge to live second by second at the center of sensation and his accompanying dread of that very fecklessness...
...in no time he disrupts the household by stealing crucifixes, stamping on a vase he doesn't like and hurling back rude answers to harmless questions...
...by an unwelcome boarder named Rico, a pimp who promises Steve big money in the flesh trade if he will only put his girl friend on the market...
...For Rimbaud, the extreme Symbolist, relying on dreams and the unconscious for inspiration, the poet cannot allow his life to accumulate by a series of accidents...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7
